I love a good old fashioned ghost story. This one was told to me by my stepfather back in 1978 or 79' when I was about 8 or 9. As far as I know it is true. I have embellished the scene with some atmospheric details, but the meat of the story is unchanged.

One night while driving home, my step father saw a ghost. He is as sure about that as you and I are about the sky being blue. He was a mechanic and was at a friend's house late one Saturday evening working on a stock car they were racing in Bradenton, Florida the following weekend. It was just after midnight when he gathered his tools and headed home.

In Naples, Florida, where I was born and raised, the main highway is Highway 41. My step father was driving home on the portion of this road refered to as Old Highway 41. I have no idea why it is called this except that maybe this section is older than the newer section. The black top was weathered and every four feet or so, there was a small bump in the road that caused your tires to make this rythmic 'thump, thump, thump' as you drove along. It was a two lane highway with a canal on both sides running parrallel to the road. Beyond the canals, a thick forest of pine and palm and tall grass spread out as far as you could see on both sides of the road.This particualr night the road was deserted, not another car in sight. Probably because of the late hour...

It was very dark and foggy, humid and warm, as is typical for South Florida. My step father had no air conditioning in his old pick-up so both windows were rolled down. His radio was dead and so he drove in silence with the 'thump, thump, thump' keeping him company. As he rounded a curve the moon made it's appearance by slipping out from behind a heavy curtain of clouds. The road ahead was lit up in white moonlight as it attempted to penetrate the fog even beyond the low beam of my step father's 1971 Chevy's headlamps.

My step father said he saw a woman, or a young girl appear on the right side of the road. She was wearing a long white gown, like a night gown, with long sleeves that hung all the way to her ankles and had long brown hair like me. She seemed to walk out of the woods, accross the canal and on to the road. My step father said he slowed down his approach as the figure crossed the road about 100 yards in front of him to the other side, went across the canal and into the woods beyond.

As he reached the area she had crossed at, he slowed further, looking out his open window to the left for any sign of her, but she had vanished into the woods. He accelerated and drove on, thinking that he must have imagined it or drifted off for a moment. No one could walk across those canals anyway, they had to be six or eight feet deep, she didn't wade through them or swim across, she seemed to drift or float. It was crazy!

This thought process took about 30 seconds, literally, and as he was thinking these thoughts he saw her again up ahead about 100 yards in front of him. She came from the right side of the road again, crossing the canal, over the road, across the canal on the other side and into the woods again. But that was impossible wasn't it? She had crossed from the right the first time a couple hundred yards back-the same girl, he was sure of it. How could she have come from the same side without crossing back and how did she get ahead of a truck going 50+ miles per hour?

This time my step father slowed way down and came to a complete stop and turned off his truck just before he would have driven past where he saw her cross. He looked to the left where he saw her go into the woods. His window was still down so he could hear the hiss from his radiator and the frogs croaking from the canal. He swallowed the lump in his throat and called out a tentative 'Hello'. No response. He opened the truck door and got out of the cab. He hesitantly walked to the side of the road and looked down the steep embankment to the canal below. He looked up and into the woods at about the spot where she entered into them. 'Hello' he called out again, nothing.

He turned to return to his truck when he looked down and noticed his own boot prints on the black top. Because of the fog and the fact that the dew had fallen, he had left tracks where he had walked about 10 feet from his truck to the side of the road. He turned and walked out in front of his truck a ways to see if there were foot prints where the girl had crossed. There were none. Wouldn't she have been wet from crossing the first canal? Where was the water? Where were her foot prints? He circled his truck around the other side to stand on the left side of the road and examine the canal and the woods beyond. 'Hello' he called again. Frogs croaking, radiator hissing, nothing. He went around the tail of his truck and got back in and shut the door. He again looked out into the woods on the left and called out one last time for no response. An owl hooted off in the distance and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He got spooked and hurriedly turned the ignition and gunned the engine. He looked one last time to the woods on the left and then the right. It was pitch black and there was no sign of a young woman in white anywhere. He was crazy, he thought and drove off towards home.

Supposedly, according to my older sister: who is a real live drama queen, by the way-the kind of person who if she told you water was wet, you'd have to turn on the faucet just to check. That being said, the rest of the story goes like this:

The next morning a girl was reported missing who lived not far from where my step father saw his ghost. She was fond of walking in the evening and had last been seen wearing a long white night gown. She was fifteen and had long brown hair. My step father had been in trouble with the law in the past, so he kept what he saw to himself. It didn't make any sense to him anyway and he had convinced himself he had imagined it. A few weeks later some fishermen in a little john boat were fishing the canals right near where my step father had seen her and came across the body of the young girl. She had been beaten, raped and strangled and left in the woods just past the canal on the right side of the road. The coroner estimated her time of death to be just after midnight the night she disappeared-the same night my step father had seen her cross the road. They never caught her murderer.